Food & Wine Names Top 5 SEC Tailgating Schools

The internet these days, it’s all about lists. Lists are nice because people are pretty much stupid and can’t be bothered to read any sort of essay or narrative anymore. They like blurbs, and GIFs, and memes. If 9-11 happened in this day and age, you would get the news from Buzzfeed, and it would be a list with 20 memes and GIFs describing your feelings about the attacks. At least four memes would be from Friends.

When you first heard the conspiracy theories, like how the Pentagon was actually hit by a cruise missile…

My point is, with such an inundation of lists, it means that most of them are completely arbitrary and meaningless, which makes the people arguing over them that much more hilarious. I suspect there will be some arguments and complaints about this Food & Wine list ranking the top five SEC tailgating schools, because it strikes me as not great. Note that although the list is a “top 5,” the schools aren’t numerically ranked, so I have no idea what, if any, order they are in.

University of Alabama
Auburn University
University of Missouri
Texas A&M University
University of South Carolina

Yeah…not sure I’m buying this one. There is one egregious omission: Ole Miss. From everything I have heard, Georgia and LSU should probably be in there too. As far as the actual selections go, as much as I love my alma mater, Missouri doesn’t deserve to be in the top five SEC tailgating schools. That isn’t to say we don’t tailgate well, but Frat Pit is long dead — hell, so is Reactor Field — and this is a crowded, impressive field, much like the SEC’s football lineup. I’m going to go ahead and say that A&M shouldn’t be there either. I have never tailgated an Aggie game, but the fact that you have to do it in College Station should be enough to disqualify them. The other three, I can’t speak to, but I doubt any of the schools aside from Alabama really compete closely with Ole Miss, Georgia, and LSU.

LSU, by the way, got possibly more love than any school on the actual list. This is how the author described Alabama’s tailgating scene.

But the Crimson Tide has some competition in the tailgating department, especially from rival Louisiana State University, which they recently beat. In UA’s campus paper The Crimson White, UA alumnus Tyler Cummings said: “’Bama tailgates lean toward barbecue, burgers, hot dogs and sausages—I suppose more of the typical game-day cuisine. Even as a ‘Bama alumnus, I’d have to say LSU has ‘Bama beat hands down on the food at tailgates.”

As a current Mizzou student, I can confirm we are not top 5 worthy. The campus as a whole is fairweather. I’m jealous of Ole Miss’s ability to consistently have the best tailgates while consistently having a mediocre football team.

As a South Carolina student I think our tailgates could definitely be considered in the top 5. The fraternity lots, farmer’s market, and fair grounds can all hold their own compared to any other school (besides Ole Miss). I’d put us somewhere from 3-5

Being a UGA student, we’re definitely top 5. And this past season, I visited Ole Miss for the LSU game and holy shit. We were pretty nuts for our LSU game, but the grove was ridiculous. Easily number 1.

The Grove was really cool, but Geoffrey and I didn’t really do anything that noteworthy, besides get super drunk and go to the game, then go out after. Also, the Grove, while awesome, wasn’t on its A-game that day. A lot of students were gone for Thanksgiving break and it was like 38 degrees all day.